Tag: Analytics

John Pozadzides sent me a Woopra invite several weeks ago and I eventually signed up last week so it’s been collecting stats on this website for a while. John did an interview with Cali Lewis of Geekbrief which goes some way into explaining why Woopra is worth checking out. It was after watching that video that I decided to sign up.

Woopra has a neat Java based desktop interface but initially I only used the web interface. That’s not so bad, but it’s static and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the desktop app. I have to confess, I was slow to install the desktop client, simply because I have a “Oh no, Java is too much trouble” switch in my brain from long ago when I attempted to install the JRE. This time it was much easier, thanks to Ubuntu’s repositories.

$ sh woopra_unix.sh
No suitable Java Virtual Machine could be found on your system.
The version of the JVM must be at least 1.6.
Please define INSTALL4J_JAVA_HOME to point to a suitable JVM.
You can also try to delete the JVM cache file /home/donncha/.install4j
$ rm -fr .install4j
$ aptitude install sun-java6-jre
$ sh woopra_unix.sh

After installing the Java runtime, installation of Woopra was simple. I’ve been looking at it now for a few hours and it’s nice. The ticker tape stats at the bottom are a neat touch, especially the up and down markers that give an indication of how your traffic compares with the day before.

Unfortunately I don’t obsess about traffic stats any more. If I did, I would absolutely love this application. If I was targeting a particular keyword and honing the SEO aspects of my site then I would find this Woopra invaluable. Like Google Analytics, I’m confident Woopra will become a useful tool I’ll come back to when it’s needed. It doesn’t even use that many resources. I barely see it ping home for new data and the Java app is reasonably light.

Oh yeah, I haven’t obscured any of the stats in the screenshots. This blog gets several thousand hits a day if you’re interested, although none from Turkmenistan apparently. I guess if I had Woopra running when Turkmenbashi died it may have showed a blip or two of traffic from that region!

I use Google Analytics to track visitor numbers to my site as well as a custom written referrers package some of the early users of WordPress.com may remember. That only records 7 days of data because of the data size so when I wanted to know how many visitors come from Google to my blog I went looking at Analytics.

To do the same on your site, open Google Analytics and select your site. Click on “Traffic Sources”, then look at the list of top sources. Chances are Google will be near the top of that list. Click on that link and you’ll see a graph like the one above. Done!

It’s now easier than ever to use Google Analytics thanks to the interface revamp it’s gone through. Michele had the scoop yesterday and I’m very impressed. From your dashboard you can drill down to various aspects of your website’s traffic.

One of those is a clickable map of the world that eventually led me to the following map of Ireland. That’s a lot of traffic from Dublin, but it’s probably something to do with the way Internet traffic in the country is routed. That, or the fact that a quarter of the population live there. Welcome Dublin people to Holy Shmoly!

A few days ago I listed the keywords people use to visit my site but now it’s easier to find that information and dig deeper into archived traffic stats. Inside the new Analytics interface, go to “Traffic Sources” where you’ll find “Top Traffic Sources”. Click on the keywords for pretty graphs!

Update! Some people aren’t happy with the new upgrade. Chris Silver Smith thinks it’s a downgrade from the old interface.

I’m Donncha Ó Caoimh and I’m a software developer at Automattic and WordPress plugin developer. I post photos at In Photos, Twitter and elsewhere.

The Golden Compass
First of a three part fantasy/sci-fi series. Some people hate it because of it's anti God message but it's a great read. I found it hard to put down. There's even a Snopes article about the film adaptation.

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